Microsoft has released a fix for recording television shows with a Windows …

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Just to clear up a potential misunderstanding: Microsoft's XP Media Center issue has nothing to do with the Windows Vista Media Center recording issue for NBC shows from late May. NBC later said that setting an optional broadcast flag for a new episode of American Gladiators was actually a mistake. The blogosphere quickly erupted into discussions about DRM and Vista, how such a move could be made accidentally, how consumers could do nothing but lay the blame, and how such a broadcast flags should not exist in the first place.

Microsoft has now released a fix to a similar problem with Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005; the update is available on the Microsoft Download Center (693KB). The update fixes a very specific a bug that only occurs when recording television shows with a Windows Media Center configuration that uses an analog TV broadcast without a set-top box. When recording analog TV, the user may receive a "protected content" error message and the recording stops.

Only install this fix if you already have Update Rollup 2 for Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 installed. This doesn't appear to be a widespread issue, but it's good to see that Microsoft has released a patch.